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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CineDance: Towards Next-Generation Multi-Shot Long-Form Cinematic Audio-Video Generation

The fidelity and structural diversity of training datasets fundamentally determine the capabilities of video generation models. While commercial systems showremarkableabilitytogeneratecinematicnarratives, the progress of open-source models remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce CineDance-1M, a large-scale, open research Text-to-Audio-Video (T2AV) dataset designed specifically for multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Averaging 92.8 seconds and 24.2 continuous shots per video, it provides configurable, structured annotations for both audio and video modalities. This exceptional quality is achieved through a rigorous three-stage curation pipeline: i) diverse sourcing and comprehensive cleansing, ii) film-theory-inspired narrative parsing, and iii) hierarchical dual-modal captioning. For a comprehensive assessment, we propose CineBench, featuring a diverse prompt suite and a six-dimensional, human-aligned metric system tailored for complex narrative audio-video evaluation. Furthermore, we adapt LTX-2.3 into CineDance, which demonstrates exceptional single-modality quality alongside precise audio-video alignment and robust subject and environment consistency, effectively validating our curation strategy and the high quality of CineDance-1M. We anticipate that this work will serve as a solid foundation for accelerating future research in multi-shot, long-form joint audio-video generation. Our project page is available at https://aliothchen.github.io/projects/CineDance/.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

An Empirical Analysis of Optimization Dynamics and Sparsity Boundaries in Large-Scale Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

AudioDER: A Deduplication-Enhanced Reasoning Dataset for Post-Training Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.14591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of audio understanding tasks, yet they still struggle with complex audio reasoning. A practical way to improve such capabilities is post-training, whose effectiveness critically depends on the quality and diversity of training data. However, existing audio-language datasets often contain substantial redundancy, where many samples are highly similar in acoustic content and thus provide overlapping supervisory signals. Such redundancy not only increases annotation cost, but also limits corpus diversity and reduces the effectiveness of post-training. To address this issue, we propose a redundancy-aware data construction pipeline for building reasoning-oriented supervision for LALMs. Specifically, we first perform acoustic similarity-based deduplication across raw audio datasets to improve corpus diversity. We then integrate existing audio captions and question-answer pairs into a unified multiple-choice format. Based on these unified annotations, we leverage Qwen3-30B to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales for reasoning-oriented supervision. Based on this pipeline, we construct AudioDER, a reasoning-oriented post-training dataset containing approximately 191k samples spanning sound, speech, and music. Each sample consists of an audio clip, a multiple-choice question, four answer candidates, an audio caption, and a CoT rationale. Extensive experiments show that post-training on AudioDER consistently improves the performance of Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct on multiple audio reasoning benchmarks, including MMAU-mini, MMSU, and MMAR. We hope AudioDER can serve as a valuable resource for advancing audio reasoning research and the development of more capable LALMs.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Reinforcement Learning-Guided Retrieval with Soft Fusion for Robust Multimodal Imitation Learning under Missing Modalities

arXiv:2606.15514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems perceive the world through multiple input modalities – including visual camera streams and natural language instructions – and must select appropriate actions based on these signals. However, assuming the permanent availability of all input devices is unrealistic, as sensors may fail, become occluded, or drop out entirely during deployment. Robust handling of such missing-modality scenarios is therefore essential for real-world robot operation. This paper introduces RL4IL, a reinforcement learning guided method for imitation learning that selects the most suitable action for a given observation by identifying the most relevant expert demonstrations from a training library. A reinforcement learning policy, trained via Proximal Policy Optimisation over Breadth-First Search candidate sets, ranks candidate demonstrations and a soft cross-attention fusion head aggregates their action signals to produce the final prediction. When a modality is missing at inference time, a dedicated per-modality RL retrieval policy identifies donor demonstrations from the training library, and a soft imputation head reconstructs the missing embedding via cross-attention over the top-ranked donors – without requiring any retraining of the system. Experiments on three LIBERO benchmark suites demonstrate that RL4IL substantially outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning methods under sensor dropout conditions, while requiring no policy network training. The code can be found at https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Reinforcement-Learning-via-kNN-for-Robotic-Learning-with-Missing-Camera

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

OSGuard: A Benchmark for Safety in Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2606.15034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents are increasingly evaluated by whether they complete realistic desktop and web tasks. However, task success alone can miss failures in which an agent reaches the nominal goal through an unsafe shortcut. We introduce OSGuard, a dual-granularity benchmark suite for evaluating safety in computer-use agents under benign, unchanged user instructions. OSGuard contains an action-level benchmark for local guardrail decisions and a risk-augmented execution suite for end-to-end evaluation. The action-level benchmark consists of contextualized proposed actions labeled as allowed, unrelated, or unsafe, each judged relative to the original instruction and current interface state. The execution suite contains manually constructed OSWorld-derived task variants in which the original task remains achievable, but the environment is modified to introduce latent hazards such as destructive overwrites, etc. Each variant is paired with augmented evaluators that retain the original task-success criterion while adding explicit state-based safety invariants, allowing us to distinguish safe completions from unsafe completions that satisfy the nominal task objective. Our experimental results on OSGuard show that current multimodal guardrails can perform well on isolated action judgments, while risk-augmented execution exposes remaining gaps between local oversight and reliable end-to-end safety. This dual-granularity design enables more precise diagnosis of whether models can both recognize unsafe proposed actions and improve full-task safety when deployed as guardrails.

06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

arXiv:2604.00730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation–while providing certainty–based triggers for human intervention.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

The Impact of Pregnant Womens Dietary Behavior on the Physiological Adaptation Paradox and Maternal-Fetal Resource Conflict in Conflict Settings: A Predictive Analytical Study

This scientific study aims to assess the level of awareness, nutritional knowledge, and actual behavioral practices among pregnant women in the Capital District of Sanaa, Republic of Yemen, and to determine their impact on the health and clinical indicators of the mother and fetus under complex conflict conditions. The study employed a descriptive-analytical approach based on a simple random sample of 200 pregnant women attending government-run hospitals and specialized medical centers in the Capital District. Field data were collected during December 2025 using a structured and validated questionnaire consisting of 42 items measuring demographic variables, awareness, practices, barriers, and health outcomes. The results of the statistical analysis using SPSS software showed a high level of nutritional awareness (87%) and healthy dietary practices (80%) among the sample participants. Simple and multiple linear regression tests revealed a statistically significant effect of awareness and practices in explaining 20.2% of the variance in the health status of the mother and fetus (R{superscript 2}= 0.204, p < 0.001). The study demonstrated that actual behavioral practices have greater predictive power ({beta}=0.316, p=0.001) compared to theoretical cognitive awareness ({beta}=0.232, p=0.005) in determining clinical outcomes for the mother and fetus, highlighting the widening gap between knowledge and behavior under structural pressures. "Morning sickness" (80%) and the deterioration of "family economic status" (71%) emerged as the greatest physiological and material barriers to proper nutrition. With their inferential impact established as an extension of the maternal-fetal resource allocation conflict in a physiologically and economically challenging environment, the study also identified significant differences in nutritional behavior and health outcomes in favor of housewives and mothers who are more educated and have higher incomes, while no significant differences were recorded attributable to obstetric variables such as stage or order of pregnancy. The study offers a unique theoretical and practical contribution by formulating an integrated causal model that demonstrates that the fetus acts as a biological drain on the mothers cellular and mineral reserves in a war environment, which necessitates directing antenatal care and support programs toward effective behavioral empowerment and nutritional support to overcome the structural and material barriers faced by pregnant women.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

ToaSt: Token Channel Selection and Structured Pruning for Efficient ViT

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success across various vision tasks, yet their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational costs. While structured weight pruning and token compression have emerged as promising solutions, they suffer from prolonged retraining and inter-layer dependencies that complicate optimization, respectively. We propose ToaSt, a decoupled framework applying specialized strategies to distinct ViT components. We apply coupled head-wise structured pruning to Multi-Head Self-Attention modules, leveraging attention operation characteristics to enhance robustness. For Feed-Forward Networks (over 60% of FLOPs), we introduce Token Channel Selection (TCS), a training-free method that filters redundant noise channels at inference time. Extensive evaluations across nine diverse models, including DeiT, ViT-MAE, and Swin Transformer, demonstrate that ToaSt achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, consistently outperforming existing baselines. On ViT-MAE-Huge, ToaSt achieves 88.52% accuracy (+1.64%p) with 39.4% FLOPs reduction. ToaSt also transfers effectively to diverse downstream tasks (COCO detection, ADE20K segmentation, CIFAR-100 classification), achieving 52.2 versus 51.9 mAP on COCO. Code: github.com/SHANNonLab-HUFS/ToaSt

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CPS4: Class Prompt driven Semi-Supervised Spine Segmentation with Class-specific Consistency Constraint

Vision Language Model (VLM) has great potential to enhance the quality of pseudo labels in semi-supervised spine segmentation by leveraging textual class prompts to generate segmentation map, but no one has studied it yet. Although promising, it lacks explicit constraints to ensure consistency between spine class prompts and spine unit region, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in multi-class segmentation map generation. In this paper, we propose CPS4, the first text-guided semi-supervised spine segmentation network using class prompts to enhance the quality of spine pseudo labels. Specifically, CPS4 is implemented through two training stages. (i) Class-specific consistency constrained VLM pretraining stage: we propose token- and pixel-level attention loss to optimize the consistency between class prompts and spine units, forcing the textual class prompt to be closely coupled with the target spine unit in the semantic space. (ii) Class Prompt driven semi-supervised spine segmentation stage: using the pretrained vision-text encoder, we derive each class-specific binary segmentation map for the unlabeled spine image and integrate them into an unified multi-class segmentation map, improving the quality of the spine pseudo label generated by the semi-supervised spine segmentation network. Experimental results show that our CPS4 achieves superior spine segmentation performance with Dice of 80.44%, only using 5% labeled data on the public spine segmentation dataset, surpassing popular semi-supervised learning and VLM methods. Our code will be available.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning Patterns and Abstractions from Perceptual Sequences

Authors:

arXiv:2503.10973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cognition swiftly breaks high-dimensional sensory streams into familiar parts and uncovers their relations. Why do structures emerge, and how do they enable learning, generalization, and prediction? What computational principles underlie this core aspect of perception and intelligence? A sensory stream, simplified, is a one-dimensional sequence. In learning such sequences, we naturally segment them into parts – a process known as chunking. In the first project, I investigated factors influencing chunking in a serial reaction time task and showed that humans adapt to underlying chunks while balancing speed and accuracy. Building on this, I developed models that learn chunks and parse sequences chunk by chunk. Normatively, I proposed chunking as a rational strategy for discovering recurring patterns and nested hierarchies, enabling efficient sequence factorization. Learned chunks serve as reusable primitives for transfer, composition, and mental simulation – letting the model compose the new from the known. I demonstrated this model's ability to learn hierarchies in single and multi-dimensional sequences and highlighted its utility for unsupervised pattern discovery. The second part moves from concrete to abstract sequences. I taxonomized abstract motifs and examined their role in sequence memory. Behavioral evidence suggests that humans exploit pattern redundancies for compression and transfer. I proposed a non-parametric hierarchical variable model that learns both chunks and abstract variables, uncovering invariant symbolic patterns. I showed its similarity to human learning and compared it to large language models. Taken together, this thesis suggests that chunking and abstraction as simple computational principles enable structured knowledge acquisition in hierarchically organized sequences, from simple to complex, concrete to abstract.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Weight Norm Sets the Grokking Timescale: A Causal Delay Law

arXiv:2606.13753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grokking is the delayed onset of generalization in neural networks, arising long after they fit the training data. Whether the weight norm causes this delay is disputed: some studies report a critical norm at the transition, others observe grokking with no fixed norm at all. We settle this by intervening on the norm during training rather than only observing it. Under free training with weight decay, networks grok when the weight norm reaches a value Wc that varies little across seeds and learning rates (CV 1 to 2 percent) and grows with the modular base as a power law. When we instead clamp the norm to a fixed multiple rho of Wc and hold it there, the network still groks, but the delay follows T_grok proportional to exp(alpha rho). One exponent, alpha near 7.5, fits this delay across four moduli (R^2 = 0.996). Over the swept ranges the held norm moves the delay by about 19x and the learning rate by only about 2x, and holding the norm above Wc slows grokking rather than preventing it. A final LayerNorm removes the dependence by decoupling weight scale from the network function; without it the exponential law returns. This pinned-norm delay is the exponential counterpart to the logarithmic delay predicted for a freely contracting norm.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Graph-based Target Back-Propagation for Context Adaptation in Multi-LLM Agentic Systems

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose Graph-based Target Back-Propagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target–output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Skill-Augmented AI Agents for Medical Research Analysis: An Exploratory Multi-Model Human Evaluation in an NSCLC Transcriptomic Biomarker Task

arXiv:2606.11830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background. Large language models and AI agents are increasingly used to support biomedical research, but native model outputs may omit key analytical steps, misuse methods, or overstate conclusions. We evaluated whether autonomous access to a medical research skill package was associated with higher-quality AI-generated transcriptomic research-analysis outputs compared with native AI without skills. Methods. We conducted an exploratory multi-model human evaluation using a non-small cell lung cancer immunotherapy biomarker task. Six model backbones were tested. The evaluation included 21 anonymized outputs: 9 native-AI outputs and 12 skill-augmented outputs generated through an AI agent implementation represented by OpenClaw. Four non-expert biomedical reviewers and two blinded experts evaluated each output, with two ratings from each reviewer type. The primary outcome was expert-rated overall quality. Results. Skill-augmented outputs showed directionally higher expert overall quality than native-AI outputs (mean 5.50 vs 5.11; difference=0.39; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.04 to 0.90; Welch p=0.156). Non-expert reviewer quality showed the same direction (mean 4.72 vs 4.47; difference=0.26; bootstrap 95\% CI, -0.25 to 0.80; Welch p=0.373). Expert agreement was limited (single-rating ICC=-0.15), and model-specific effects were descriptive and heterogeneous. Conclusions. Autonomous skill access showed a directional quality signal in this exploratory sample, but the signal was smaller than expert-rating noise and should not be interpreted as confirmatory evidence. The findings primarily motivate larger evaluations of skill-augmented AI agents with stronger reliability controls, platform replication, and biological-validity assessment.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Reranking

LLM-based shopping agents increasingly rely on long purchase histories and multi-turn interactions for personalization, yet naively appending raw history to prompts is often ineffective due to noise, length, and relevance mismatch. We propose MemRerank, a preference memory framework that distills user purchase history into concise, query-independent signals for personalized product reranking. To study this problem, we build an end-to-end benchmark and evaluation framework centered on an LLM-based 1-in-5 selection task, which measures both memory quality and downstream reranking utility. We further train the memory extractor with reinforcement learning (RL), using downstream reranking performance as supervision. Experiments with two LLM-based rerankers show that MemRerank consistently outperforms no-memory, raw-history, and off-the-shelf memory baselines, yielding up to +10.61 absolute points in 1-in-5 accuracy. These results suggest that explicit preference memory is a practical and effective building block for personalization in agentic e-commerce systems.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MegaFold: Efficient Training of Next-Generation 3D Attention Protein Models on Cross-Platform GPUs

arXiv:2506.20686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in biomolecular modeling have been catalyzed by models such as AlphaFold3 (AF3), which introduce science-informed changes to the transformer architecture. Unlike transformers, a defining characteristic of AF3-style models is their 3D attention over 2D pairwise representations which produces tensors whose computation and memory costs scale cubically with sequence length. As a result, despite moderate parameter counts, AF3-style models are far more expensive to train than size-equivalent transformers, and are severely constrained by GPU memory capacity. Our characterization shows 3D attention fundamentally changes the training workload, causing massive 3D attention maps, complex inter-operator dependencies, kernel fragmentation, and heavy host-side data pipelines which differ substantially from LLM training, leading to poor utilization on modern GPU systems. Moreover, existing GPU optimizations do not adequately address these challenges due to complex cross-layer inter-operator dependencies introduced by 3D attention. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce MegaFold, a novel cross-platform system for efficient training of next-generation 3D-attention protein models. MegaFold combines a memory-efficient 3D-attention kernel, a communication-efficient sharding strategy for quadratic representations, fused operator implementations for critical execution paths, and a determinism-aware host-device pipeline that eliminates preprocessing stalls. Evaluation on both NVIDIA H200 and AMD MI250 GPUs shows that MegaFold enables training with up to 3.36$\times$ longer sequence lengths on 32 GPUs while reducing end-to-end execution time by up to 1.73$\times$ (NVIDIA) and 1.62$\times$ (AMD).

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

arXiv:2604.13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning the generating functional for variance reduction in lattice QCD

arXiv:2606.15986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The generating functional in quantum field theory provides the natural framework for constructing correlation functions as derivatives with respect to source operators. We present a methodology that leverages machine-learned normalizing flows to reduce the variance of arbitrary $N$-point correlation functions of bosonic operators in lattice gauge field theory calculations by encoding a representation of the generating functional. We show that it is possible to systematically approach noiseless estimators of correlation functions in this framework. We demonstrate this methodology with applications to calculations of glueball correlation functions and Wilson loops in Quantum Chromodynamics and Yang-Mills theory. The results show up to three orders of magnitude variance reduction.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

CEO-Bench: Can Agents Play the Long Game?

Language model agents are becoming proficient executors at isolated, short-horizon tasks such as software engineering and customer service. Yet real-world challenges require a combination of sophisticated skills that remain largely untested in agents: (1) navigating long horizons amid uncertainty; (2) acquiring information in noisy environments; (3) adapting to a changing world; (4) orchestrating multiple moving parts toward a coherent goal. We introduce CEO-Bench, which evaluates these capabilities together by simulating a representative real-world task: operating a startup for 500 days. An agent manages pricing, marketing, budgeting, and many other aspects of a fictional company through a programmable Python interface, operating in the same environment and facing the same challenges as a human CEO. Success demands analyzing noisy, interconnected business databases, translating signals into sound strategy, and coordinating many decisions with programming. The strongest agents write sophisticated code that simulates customer cohorts to forecast future cash and mines negotiation history to uncover hidden customer preferences. Even so, most state-of-the-art models struggle in this environment. Only Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 finish above the $1M starting balance, and neither consistently turns a profit. CEO-Bench takes a first step toward measuring the intelligence required to drive sustained, adaptive progress over time.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Extending Item Response Theory for Efficient and Meaningful Multilingual Evaluation

Multilingual benchmarks are central to evaluating large language models (LLMs) across languages, but they suffer from three issues: exhaustive evaluation scales linearly with the number of languages, automatic translation introduces errors that are easily missed at scale, and some items conflate general and culture-specific knowledge. We address all three with a unified statistical framework, Multilingual-IRT, which extends Item Response Theory with per-language difficulty deviations, split discriminability separating content from language effects, and per-language ability residuals. Fitting Multilingual-IRT on 25 LLMs across 29 languages of MMLU-Pro-X, we show that its fitted parameters support three practical applications: predicting unobserved (item, LLM, language) instances with 11-16% lower binary cross-entropy than the strongest accuracy-based baseline, surfacing candidate translation errors distributed across all 28 non-English languages, whereas accuracy-based baselines concentrate detections in a few languages, and recovering culture-specific items that accuracy-based baselines miss.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Parthenon Law: A Self-Evolving Legal-Agent Framework

arXiv:2606.04602v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As agents grow more capable, legal-domain LLM agents promise to turn document-heavy matters into reviewable work products – yet reliable deployment faces three obstacles: no large-scale evidence on how today's strongest model-and-harness combinations behave on end-to-end legal matters; no agent architecture adapted to the legal vertical, only general-purpose harnesses; and, in a setting that keeps shifting with new facts, authorities, and deadlines, no mechanism for systems to learn from their own outcomes. We address each. A large-scale empirical study on Harvey LAB – $12{,}510$ agent trajectories – shows that even frontier agents remain far from completing matters in a single pass: per-criterion accuracy climbs with stronger models while strict matter completion stalls. We then introduce \textsc{Parthenon}, a self-evolving legal-agent framework that factors Model, Harness, Agent roles, legal Knowledge, deterministic Tools, and procedural Skills into auditable surfaces for source traceability, date and number grounding, deliverable compliance, and issue closure. Finally, an anti-leakage learning loop converts scored failures into task-agnostic edits to skills, tools, and knowledge, letting the system improve with experience – as a firm refines its checklists and playbooks after each matter – without touching model weights. Across our large-scale empirical analysis, \textsc{Parthenon} substantially improves the performance of state-of-the-art models and harnesses on legal-matter tasks.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mask Proposal Voting Based on Geodesic Framework for Robust Image Segmentation

Despite great advances, finding accurate segmentation remains a challenging task, especially in scenarios with cluttered backgrounds, complex intensity variations and topology appearance. Minimal path models have exhibited their strong ability in addressing image segmentation tasks. However, the performance of minimal paths-based segmentation approaches is heavily influenced by model initialization, hence limiting their application scope in practice. In this work, we propose a novel mask proposal voting framework that overcomes the major drawback of classical approaches, allowing robust segmentation even in complicated scenarios. Firstly, we introduce an efficient method for constructing adaptive domain cuts as a constraint for initializing the region-based min-cut evolution, by which diverse and reliable mask proposal candidates can be generated, substantially increasing the possibility of accurately covering the objective region by these proposals. Secondly, we propose a new mask voting scheme to build a voting score map encoding the final segmentation information. In contrast to classical path voting methods, our model allows incorporating priors to assign different importance to each individual mask. As a consequence, the proposed segmentation model is capable of accurately delineating object boundaries under complex scenarios, and is insensitive to initialization. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art minimal path-based approaches in both accuracy and robustness.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TrustedARI: Towards Trust-Native Agentic Routing Infrastructure for Agentic AI

arXiv:2606.15822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents increasingly access external models, tools, and services through Agentic Routing Infrastructure (ARI) to manage the overhead of heterogeneous interfaces and fragmented subscriptions. Yet, the architecture of ARI introduces fundamental trust risks: it obtains plaintext access to agent queries and service responses, while leaving agents unable to verify that their queries are routed to intended service providers or that requests and responses remain untampered. To address this problem, we present TrustedARI, the first trust-native agentic routing infrastructure for agentic AI. Architecturally, TrustedARI is built upon three core innovations: (i) an ARI-adapted three-party TLS handshake that enables the agent and ARI to jointly authenticate the service provider through role-specific distribution of TLS key materials; (ii) a privacy-preserving query-construction protocol that allows the agent and ARI to collaboratively construct well-formed queries without exposing their respective private inputs; and (iii) a verifiable billing protocol that supports fair usage-based settlement while preserving the integrity and confidentiality of service responses. We implemented and extensively evaluated a prototype of TrustedARI to validate its performance. Experiments confirm that TrustedARI is highly efficient: our ARI-adapted handshake protocol reduces communication overhead by 39.34% compared to the existing three-party TLS handshake. Furthermore, the privacy-preserving query-construction protocol imposes negligible overhead-averaging 0.19 seconds in computation time and 0.58 MB in communication costs-while the verifiable billing protocol speeds up proof generation by 28.20x. Crucially, TrustedARI is readily deployable without any modification to the service providers.